Friday, March 25, 2016

That the Republican Party must reform or become irrelevant
is increasingly obvious to most people. The hardest fact to deal with is that
the voter base has shifted leftward over the last thirty-six years; the
attitudes, values, and beliefs that appealed to many boomers doesn’t appeal as
much to Gen-Xers and even less to millennials. If the GOP is to remain the
American analogue to Britain’s Conservative Party, it follows that conservatives
themselves must define what it means to be conservative in the 21st century.

Conservativism vs. Utopianism

The question would have seemed strange to
mid-century American conservative thinkers like Peter Viereck, Russell Kirk and
Robert Nisbet. In their view, conservatism was anti-utopian by definition. In
different ways, they identified “conservatism” with a suspicion of radical
schemes to revolutionize America and the world.
But today’s orthodox conservatism consists almost
entirely of radical utopian schemes to revolutionize America and the world.
So-called “movement conservatism” or “fusionism” in its present form is, in
fact, an alliance of three distinct utopian movements in economics, domestic
policy and foreign policy. All three crusades are doomed to fail in the real
world.

A modern realist, I find, is very often one who, having
despaired of the real world ever meeting the standards of his ideals, goes on
to conclude that we should have no ideals. Lind, a modern realist, therefore
plunks for a bare-bones conservativism, one that seeks merely to preserve the
status quo rather than strive for a better nation.

Unfortunately, Lind doesn’t tell us why the status quo is to
be preserved, or why change is unnecessary. He merely defines three particular
efforts as “utopian” and derides any attempt to achieve them through politics
as “madness”.

Here Comes Galileo (Again!?)

I have a lot of respect for Selmys. C. S. Lewis said once
that he didn’t talk about homosexuality as a rule because it wasn’t a problem
in his life; he wouldn’t tell someone how to fight a battle he’d never fought.
Likewise, never having thought of myself as anything but a male, I’m in no
position to tell people with gender-identity disorder how to overcome it, nor
can I fault them if they fail. In fact, as I understand it, GID is an almost
intractable problem; even sexual-reassignment surgery is unreliable as a
palliative. (See my
post in The Impractical Catholic on sex changes.)

As I say, I respect Selmys, and don’t wish to impugn her
fidelity to the Church. However, in defending her second postulate, instead of
stepping through the common arguments in support of Church teaching and calling
them into question, she drags Galileo into the argument to serve once more as
the sine qua non of magisterial
error. Poor, abused Galileo! Never simply allowed to rest vindicated, his shade
must be constantly conjured up to bolster weak arguments: “Well, the Church has
been wrong before. Just look at Galileo!”

Why, O why does Selmys, who is capable of so much better,
reach for such a hackneyed and intellectually lazy comparison? Well, because
apparently the Church hasn’t formally instituted the “binary model” as dogma:

How does this relate to the transgender question?
Well, today we know that various bodies with lower levels of authority (lower,
in many cases than the Inquisition of 1616) have condemned transgender
identities. We know that Popes have offered indirect criticism (though
Christmas greetings and Papal homilies are not official dogmatic pronouncements
any more than airplane interviews are.) We know that the weight of theological
tradition falls on the side of a strict male-female binary, and we know that
Genesis 1:27 and Matthew 19:4 are traditionally interpreted as excluding
legitimate variation from this scheme.
We also know that nothing about transgender or intersex
conditions has been promulgated at a level of authority that meets Vatican I’s
criteria for infallibility. This means that there remains open the possibility of developments in doctrine that
will reveal a space within the order of creation for those who do not fit
neatly into binary categories [bold type mine.—ASL].
The basic teaching — that we are created male and female in the image and
likeness of God — could be compatible with the idea that there is some
admixture of both the male and the female in certain individuals (an idea
which, in fact, has roots in some ancient Jewish interpretive traditions.)

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